Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Strategic Pizza

Given two players alternately picking pieces of a pizza sliced by radial cuts, in such a way that after the first piece is taken every subsequent chosen piece is adjacent to some previously taken piece, we provide a strategy for the starting player to get 4/9 of the pizza. This is best possible and settles a conjecture of Peter Winkler.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

This is interesting, but I admit to having a bit of trouble with the example presented for consideration following the proof of Theorem 4.2 If a-minor is equal to zero, doesn't that mean that a-major is a single slice bounded by L-1 and L-last which would then be adjacent switching lines thus violating the premise of the theorem? Also providing a counter-example to Lemma 3.2